Search: “far right”

Another terrorist attack, another manifesto. Actually these documents are quite rare in the history of terrorism. Some terrorists will leave social media clues to the reasons behind their actions (FaceBook posts, Tweets). Others like Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Islamist extremist behind the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill, leave a short cellphone video outlining the rationale for […]

Here is a link to the YouTube version of podcast (it is also available on iTunes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uy_S0Inojk Here are some informative links about China’s campaign against the Uyghurs https://thediplomat.com/2019/01/are-indonesia-and-malaysia-ready-to-stand-up-for-chinas-muslims/ https://www.rfa.org/english/women/suffering-01302019152956.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/02/07/uighurs-australia/?utm_term=.59e0784d5aea https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2186446/beijing-backs-patriotic-actions-chinese-students-who-reported https://ent.siteintelgroup.com/Chatter/is-supporter-calls-to-kill-chinese-in-defense-of-islam-and-uyghurs.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/21/how-china-tried-stop-my-freedom-speech-canada/?utm_term=.214ddb57f282&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/china-has-put-1-million-muslims-in-concentration-camps-mbs-had-nothing-to-say/2019/02/24/370be676-36e4-11e9-854a-7a14d7fec96a_story.html?utm_term=.84e60354c337&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chinas-expanding-war-on-islam-now-theyre-coming-for-the-kazakhs/2019/03/01/16ebbe76-38ff-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html?utm_term=.0e75941659e5&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1 Featured terrorist attack – Kashmir https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/02/15/a-deadly-bombing-provokes-a-crisis-between-india-and-pakistan Terrorism this fortnight (Feb 12-25) Afghanistan Afghan Intelligence forces arrested two members of […]

I am fairly certain that the average citizen sees terrorists as ‘not normal’. In a strict linguistic sense this is of course true as terrorists do not hew to the ‘norm’: hence they are not ‘normal’. In a larger sense, however, it is far from clear what ‘normal’ means. Are we talking about their backgrounds […]

Is it just me or has there been a tendency of late, at least for some people, to see terrorists as victims? If you have been reading the many, many stories about those who joined Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups and who now want to come home, you may have noticed that they […]

At the risk of adding yet one more blog post to the burning question of whether or not Canada – and by extension other countries – has a ‘moral obligation‘ to repatriate its citizens who deliberately, consciously and with full agency left to join terrorist groups such as Islamic State (IS) in Syria and/or Iraq, […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on February 11, 2019. We in Canada have terrorism on the brain.  On any given day there is at least one, and unfortunately usually far more than one, terrorist act somewhere  on this planet.  Death and destruction executed by idiots who see the use of violence as God’s […]

There have been a lot of very good analytic pieces on Islamic State of late, especially in the wake of US President Trump’s Tweet “we have won against ISIS; we’ve beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly”.  Here are links to  a few: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/17/its-not-just-isis-many-terrorist-groups-have-been-declared-dead-only-rise-again/?utm_term=.dab4f12cf0b8 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/tracking-jihadist-movements-2019-islamic-state https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/islamic-state-terrorism-extremism-eyes-southeast-asia-11199586 https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1577356/pentagon-isis-syria-could-regroup-6-months https://www.thedailybeast.com/isis-smuggler-sleeper-cells-and-undead-suicide-bombers-have-infiltrated-europe?ref=home The US office of the Director of […]

In the classic Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking Glass, Alice in has an interesting exchange with Humpty Dumpty. When she expresses puzzlement over how he is using the word ‘glory’, he replies as follows: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 28, 2019. If there is one thing in the world of terrorism that touches Canada the most, at least in the minds of average Canadians, it is the issue of those among us who elected to leave to join violent extremist groups abroad. Some of these […]

There is an old saying “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. It means that if you want to exert influence and win people over it is better to use nice rather than nasty means. US President Trump has clearly never read this saying (from what I hear he doesn’t read, period, and […]